Songsterr automated guitar tabs

Just had one of those moments where the thing that I've been looking for or was surprised that I hadn't seen online suddenly appeared. I've been learning the guitar for about 8 months now and I've got to the point where I've started to look for guitar tabs online. It's almost like going back in time to the late 90's where the websites are poorly constructed and full of ads.

There had been that niggling thought in the back of my mind, surely someone could do a better job and they have. It's called Songsterr and it not only shows the guitar tabs, but you can hit play and it plays them for you. It's clearly computer generated, but the accuracy of it makes it easier to hear what they're actually doing and therefore ideal for learning guitar. It even grades the difficulty of the songs so that you can attempt songs you would be capable of.

Brilliant. Songsterr.

Publish Post

Foursquare and Ten Friends to the pub...

Ok, so the internet is full of fads. Maybe Foursquare is one, maybe it isn't. Do I know the answer? No, do I care, not particularly. Mostly because I'm just enjoying this one. Not only is Foursquare fun but it's the side of social networking that seems to make sense.

You 'check-in' to venues in your immediate vicinity and in doing so, alert your friends to your activities and location. Check in to your local pub and your friends might just think that's a good idea too. Moreover, if they're already there at the same venue you'll find out straight away.

It's early days, but my page is http://foursquare.com/user/-2248787

Daytum let's you record your life your way

If you've ever wondered how much coffee you actually drink, or how much time you spend commuting every day then an educated guess is about all you could manage. If you're Nicholas Felton you might have taken this even further - to the extent of recording elements of your daily life for an entire year and turning them into a summary graphic.

This dedication lead Nicholas and Ryan Case to create Daytum. Think of anything that you would want to record and then add it to daytum. It stores it for you and allows you to easily output the information in the form of tables graphs and random images. The only limits are your commitment and your imagination.

Sign up today at www.daytum.com. My daytum page is www.daytum.com/richgarner. It's early days but hopefully it will start taking some shape in a few weeks.

Japanese Ring tones cure sinusitis

Japan has taken that step towards your mobile phone being a medical health device by designing a ring tone that clears your sinuses... hana SUKKIRI MELODY has variable frequencies that are said to dislodge the pollen from your nasal cavities and let it fall out your nose. Will this lead to a speight of people holding their phones to their noses rather than answering them? Not sure, but it seems a little far fetched. You can download this ringtone here.

If this was such a good idea, why not come up with sounds that have therapeutic effects elsewhere? Frequencies that dislodge the earwax from your ears, or are played after closing time to sober people up for the way home, or music that makes you better in bed.... though that already exists I suppose.

LOCAL GOOGLE - INFURIATING

OK, 10 points goes to the person who can work out how to actually get to www.google.com from the UK. It's crazy.Any variation on typing in www.google.com actually re-directs me to the www.google.co.uk website. This includes:

1. Typing www.google.com into my browser
2. Searching for Google.com and clicking on the google results and still getting re-directed
3. Starting 'safe browsing' - i.e. supposedly anonymous browsing and trying the above.

You can't change any of this through your search settings.

A little research has found that it's actually google doing this at their end, when they see my IP address, so the only way to get around it seemingly is to spoof your IP address. Or, to use their new secure version of Google search which is on https://www.google.com

WORDPRESS IS MORE THAN A BLOGGING SERVICE

Ok, so if you know me well then you know that although I have my moments of genius I also have my 'slow' moments. To be honest, I think my lack of realisation that blogging sites had become web site building services is one of those. Perhaps it's because of their slow, insipid creep towards being self-building websites that it's crept in under my radar. Perhaps it's because I'm still old school enough to think that sites that build websites can't be the best approach. Either way it's naive.

Not only is Wordpress an amazing way to build a website, people with little or no knowledge of how a website works can build websites in a fraction of the time it takes to build one in dreamweaver and ultimately had far more of the social media services & functionality built in than I could ever manage. Enhancing the site involves downloading another widget and installing it. Bingo. Hours of an individual's work captured and used to your end's without you missing a single night's sleep or having to cancel that date. What happened to the geek crown of sacrifice?

All I can say is, if you have ever wanted to build a website but don't know how or just want the opportunity to express some random part of your personality then give it a go. It's so easy it's embarassing.

ONLINE BACKUP SERVICE

Fret no more about whether or not your computer, or indeed any internet connected device is backed up. It's ok to have an external backup drive, but realistically we just don't back up to it enough. Complacency sets in and all of a sudden it's been months since the last back up and critical files are at risk of loss.

Fail rates of drives may be low, but 2% fail in some way in the first year, but it's not just that. 43% of people manage to accidentally delete files every year, plus there is the issue of theft. Only 3 in every 100 laptops that are stolen are recovered, plus there's fire, dropping your laptop, spilling water on it. I'm not suggesting it's going to happen, but sometimes these things do. Let's face it, when it does happen, it's devastating. It was the loss of my drive 10 years ago that led me to start my photo website so that I felt that at least in some part, my photos would always be there. 

Carbonite is a backup system that uses your broadband network to backup your entire drive of your laptop or your phone to the internet. Clever software you install monitors what files have changed and backs them up in the background without you doing a thing. All this for less than £50 a year. Brilliant.

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GOOGLE IN PRIVATE

Google launched something pretty cool today, but perhaps something that wouldn't immediately appear so. If you've ever wanted to search for something without your ISP knowing about it - for example illegal downloads - then you may have been concerned about using your search to do so. Not any more. Google have launched a secure version of their Google.com search which means that only Google and you know what it is that you searched for.

The same goes if you are on a public computer - you can search without worry that the next person is going to see your search history - though it may well still be tracked on your machine if you're not using private browsing. 

It's only available on the main google.com site at the moment and can be reached either by going to the www.google.com site and then putting an 's' after the http or by bookmarking that page i.e. https://www.google.com.

Now, what can I search for?

phone posting

This is my first ever phone post. seems weird to think this is publishing to the web, from my Android phone, over the phone network, on to the web, into my blogger site, onto my blog and streamed via RSS to miune. Simple? No. Impressive? Yes.

I drove an electric car today!!!

Wow. Well this is one of those moments - the first time I ever drove an electric car. It was very impressive to be honest. Not only was it electric, but it was a great car too.

Based on the Mitsubishi 'i' car chassis, the engine has been replaced by a purely electric drive train and battery that can be charged from the household mains from flat to full in 6hrs. Not bad, bit like my phone really. That charge will cost you £1, making the annual estimated bill £144. Brilliant.

Driving it is so different. The power is totally consistent, a bit more like the opposite of breaking - it's smooth and even rather than jerky, either as a result of the engine changing gear manually or automatically. Spookily quiet as well, though with the windows down - it was a summer's day - the sounds of the city were enough.

Acceleration was good - we beat a Bentley and a Prius off the lights by quite a margin - apparently it's about 30% quicker than an equivalent 'city car'. It's due out at the start of next year thanks to the government's recent announcement that they are giving £5k rebate off electric cars and although I don't think I'll be getting one myself just yet (at about £30k) if I had the cash and lived in the city I'd probably do it. No congestion charge, no car tax and less than a weekend's spending money a year on charging. Life changing.

PIPE DREAMS

So, on the massive voyage of discovery that the internet seems to be these days, in trying to work out how to 'mashup' information from the web into a single feed for my site I discovered yahoo pipes.

To say this online service is comprehensive is an understatement, it's like looking for a subway, but finding a gourmet deli counter, that's free. You can take any source of information from the web and combine, filter and tweak the information into an output format of your choice. All online. All through an easy to use visual editor.

I had no idea that yahoo offered services like this, but Yahoo Pipes is truly a killer service.

PUBLISHING RSS FEEDS IN HTML

I've discovered webrss.com, which has provided a partial answer to the immediate issues of how to publish content to my site. I've managed to combine multiple RSS feeds (for Free!) into a single home page, but am starting to realise that it's only part of the solution. Because the feeds are in javascript they take a while to load up - something that you can get away with in PHP. In refreshing my website I'm also starting to realise quite how much work it's going to take to re-build my site. I just can't believe wordpress is going to provide the solution, but we'll see. I'm starting to think a combination of RSS feeds in a PHP site is the only way. I must resist.

Update (10th June 2010) - Although WebRSS works it doesn't. Sometimes nothing appears on the page at all which is a problem when most of the page is now built using feed mashups. There doesn't seem to be an easy way to publish the content through feeds without using PHP.

PACMAN HITS 30!

As if there's wasn't enough about to remind us that we're getting old, even a neon yellow ball of joy can age. Google, as per normal, out did everyone IN THE WORLD by recreating their logo as a grid for pac man. Have a go for old time's sake at the Pacman 30th anniversary site

ONE STEP CLOSER

Ok. So I've worked out how to get a self-hosted wordpress.org blog up on my site, but still haven't worked out how to maintain a website outside of wordpress but maintain the blog within it.

Currently, the only option seems to be to build a new version of my existing site, which is currently in Html in PHP because the site needs to translate the RSS feed into HTMl. There is one other option, that involves using a site that converts feeds into html. I'll give it a go, maybe this will be the first post I use when I've cracked it.

To PHP or not to PHP?

Woah, the veil of technical complexity descends. I've managed to get to a point where I've realised that most hosting providers either support external blog sites like wordpress or blogger, but if you want to have control of your blog on your site it's all a little bit tricky.

So far, I've managed to get my hosting to set up a content management system (Drupal) on the www.futurish.com domain, but somewhat inconveniently the only blog service it seems to instantly support is wordpress not blogger. I'm now a little bit torn as to which one I should use.

The only alternative seems to be to create my futurish, or indeed any other site I want to host my own blog within my own functional site in PHP - something which to date is a little outside of my abilities. The question is whether or not it's a good idea to learn PHP just to solve this problem. Part of me is intrigued but another part of me is reminded that this is supposed to be something that is accessible to all not just to the few - I need to find a formula that makes it work for all.

The saga continues...